Back in the 80s I didn’t fuck with twee much. I was too cool — I needed my music dark, aggressive, arty. Revolutionary. A bit abrasive at least. Twee came across fairly ridiculous; I only ever met one person who was into it. It was probably big in Japan. These days I’m OK with being a soft boy, plus twee has developed a nice patina of vintageness, and Exeterian Lande Hekt’s oeuvre goes down very easy indeed. Her particular sound is more produced and rocks a bit harder than the classics of Sarah and Postcard, but the pretty, soaring choruses are on point, as are Lande’s socks and loafers Paris-in-the-60s fashion. Her Lucky Now album came out in January but didn’t find me until recently, and quickly got rear-ended by a new EP called Threadbare. Deep cut “The Time Changes” is in heavy rotation on the slowgraffitti SL-1200, but I can’t find lyrics for that one so I’ll just share the delicious title track from Lucky Now…
An appointment at an embassy
A promise of sobriety
A single night where you didn't go to sleep
I was a tiny fish, don't know how I crossed that sea
Walking around my old life now to make sense of a changing scene
Crisp packet in the storm that was used since before you were born
Only you know what you meant to me
For all the times you were on the road
You have let me down
If you wanna come, wanna come home
You would be lucky now…
Chicagoan Frances Chang is certainly an experimentalist — most of the songs on been thinking bout confession feel like they’re growing from the soil with little human intervention. She centers vocals and piano, loose and floaty and somehow also quite deliberate — somewhere on the continuum of Klein, Julia Holter, Spirit of Eden-era Talk Talk and Pretty V. Amongst all that freedom of form there’s a bit of structure to “I Can Feel the Waves,” a ballad of rare, dreamy beauty.
Spent all day in the same place
Hovering, not acknowledging the biggest space
These three rooms ever contained
And I wondered what you really thought, what you really felt
What you lie awake at night telling yourself
You never really know someone, never be inside their skin
Nor would you really wanna be
One of us might leave
Sooner than we think
Or we could be stuck here for all eternity!
Bad omen feeling
Just when you think it’s all unalive
I can feel the waves, big and black
Coming in fast, pushing towards the stone
Ready to dissolve the castles made of sand that we love
This Is Lorelei first got on my radar a couple years ago with “Where’s Your Love Now?” but I didn’t spend enough time with it to rate it the best break up song ever until Nate Amos started putting out new stuff this year…
I said, where's your love now?
Long after your song is over
You left me to drink, I thought I'd die in my sleep
But I'm healthier now
And I'm happier now
Long after our love is over
But you lied me a hole I thought I couldn't repair
And you didn't blink
I'm gonna let me be angry
'Cause I tried to be fine for too damn long
And I guess I should tell you
You can't seriously think I'd forget those lines
Shaking hands, I touch words that you said out loud
My crying eyes that could only look down in shame
I don't think you could know all the shame I feel
The Singer in My Band album has left me in a state of astonishment and teen crush love with boyish, otherworldly and intense Nate. He’s got a bit of a Nick Drake presence, and more than a touch of Elliot Smith’s sweet tragedy. I love it when he fearlessly drops into a low register for the line “I will eat my heart in the morning light.” Turns out he’s also one half of Water From My Eyes, who knew? Hard to pick a favorite song — TSIMB is fish-like: stuffed to the very gills with classics. Here’s Nate performing live, doing the aforementioned "I Will Eat My Heart In The Morning Light" and "Billy Came Back" off the new one, as well as “Dancing in the Club” from his previous album.
I’m not stupid, I know you guys are gonna eye each other and eye roll hard when I bring up Two Shell yet again, but they have an album up, Infinite Now+, that may soon morph into something else but in the meantime it’s 55 French-Touchy hyperpop tracks and I can’t find anything on it that fails to tingle. They are polarizing online, mainly because of youngsters that can’t grasp their playful engagement with questionable taste, or can’t categorize them, or get all paranoid they’re being pranked. Life is boring and personally I am fine with being pranked; just dive in and dance girls, it’s delicious.
Along with Overmono and, well yes, Two Shell, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith is to my mind one of the three legs of the great golden inverted stool of 2026 avant-garde electronic. Like those paired-up boys, she mines 90s idioms and expands the vocabulary of hyperpop with frequent dips into rich emotionality. She’s quite the explorer, assembling great libraries of surprising textures and musicalities with her trusty Buchla 100 Synthesizer and weaving them into unthinkable, unquestionable future-dance masterpieces.
**Krazy Kraffitti Kino Korner**
Seeing movies in theaters is back, apparently: I could barely find a ticket anywhere in greater L.A. for You Can See Everything on its opening weekend and it didn’t disappoint — it was one of those rare and precious experiences where the whole audience walks out bonded by a communal sense of astonishment. I don’t know when I’ve seen a documentary with such a sense of theatricality, Nathan Fielder playing himself as a quietly suspicious detective, a perfect foil for Elizabeth Holmes’ boundless self-belief and hypnotic powers. The film is a deep dive into post-truth consciousness, with Liz the high priestess of seemingly guileless factual hide and seek — saucer-eyed, boundlessly “open,” friendly and trusting. Part of her methodology, which she discusses, involves genuinely handing her full trust over to people (at least people who can benefit her), and she takes aim at Fielder, essentially implying “look how much I trust you — how can you possibly not trust me?” You have to wonder why she chose him of all people to document her life right before her imprisonment. In the film, her partner alludes to them looking for someone who thinks outside the box. It’s almost like she wanted to see how she’d measure up against a master of creating artifice. Astonishing that this film got made — as if it had some spirit of its own that was determined to manifest.
/KKKK
Speaking of music, which is what this blog is supposed to be about, the mysterious, eccentric, “UK-based” Noa Kurzweil AKA Voice Actor has birthed a new three-song single? EP? called Good Luck, and I’ve been intrigued by a track called “High-Rise” in which in her characteristic mumbly, sleep-talking style she paints a matter-of-fact, somewhat bureaucratic and dread-inducing picture of — not sure what exactly, but something to do with dehumanized urban planning? I sense a parallel with Laurie Anderson, but Kurzweil is way off on her own tangent. Over a bubbling, skittering beat courtesy of Lukid (which eventually turns into washes of angst) scraps of spoken lyrics can be parsed:
Vertical building / ancient civilization
…with the construction of pyramids…
high-rise, multi-family…
stress associated with mental health issues…
it is unclear whether the high-rise environment is creating the living conditions that lead to poor mental health…
easy access to a place of great height…
fear of isolating, social isolation…
NYC’s Bowery Electric (Lawrence Chandler and Martha Schwendener) didn’t get on my radar back in the 90s, but their second album Beat just got a re-release and wow, what a vibe — not a million opium smoke tendrils away from the mighty Seefeel, and even more druggy and hypnotic. The title track in particular is like a deliciously slow, organic build to the sweet surrender of heroin (speaking from conjecture here btw). The subtle textural abrasion is blissful; the (sparse) vocals like siren calls.
I suspect I’ve enthused about Klein a lot already in these pages. She’s Nigerian from South London and she’s experimental in a truly expansive way, just willing to go anywhere — including melodicism. my own fairytale opens with “forever yours” — an artlessly strummed stringed instrument, a bit of referee whistle and some atonal harmonica that somehow holds together and even seduces. On “c thru me” she makes Lopatin-esque jarring cuts between similar/different sonic washes; elsewhere she’s pure sound sculpture (“suspect”), or fast-growing strings trying to find a structured musicality (“siren reloaded”). The most direct and powerful track — the hit single if you will — is “man in the mirror,” a haunted, deeply personal and exposed mantra about feeling called to action even as she’s visited by the specter of death.
I see the man in the mirror / something i got to be
I see the man in the mirror / Something i had to be
I c it / so so
imagine all the times i've just dreamt about death
can't breathe / can't think
gotta see it like a test
malcolm had a plan
imagine seeing a nigga die just in front of you
18 years / still a kid
i still see smoke in the air
what u mean
i c the man in the mirror
sometimes i just run away
thinking about times that i've prayed
and lately I’ve been feeling happy
i can see it’s right in front of me
In a world so bleak and grey
I just blink and I see my future
but my sister won’t even talk to me
i see the feds are knocking on the door just for a piece of me
Product of my city
I see the man in the mirror / something i had to be
I should know more about seminal British post-punk girl group The Raincoats. I am sorry. I did enthuse about co-founder Gina Birch’s new stuff earlier this year, so I get credit for that right? The point being “Only Loved at Night” from their 1981 Rough Trade album Odyshape turned up on Djrum’s new DJ-Kicks mixtape and what a thing of loveliness it is. Something so frail about the raw vocals and the hesitant, plinking piano. They were much adored by 90s-era influencer Kurt Cobain apparently. I must do a deeper dive but in the meantime let’s have a listen…
A beauty only loved at night
At daytime a face full of marks
Her eyes have been in flames all night
The sun won't have eyes for her again
Only loved at night, the lady in the dark
Knew the size of tall buildings
How dear a day-kiss could be
Those buildings that saw all the airplanes
That kissed the air in vain fantasy
Only loved at night, the lady in the dark
Didn't her eyes reflect all of this?
Why couldn't they look into her eyes?
Didn't each night love her another time?
Male nights and sometimes female
Boys loved her at night
Girls loved her in the dark
I’m getting the cut-your-own-throat signal from my editor, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the delirious, gothy heights scaled once again by Agnes Obel on her new one The Meaning of Flowers. I can’t believe it’s been six years since the angelic Danish goddess saved a wretch like me with Myopia. She sounds like medieval devotional music as much as she does Kate Bush, Elizabeth Fraser or Enya. Or for a contemporary reference Susanne Sundfør. But there’s a stillness, a poise about her that sets her apart — on this new one she seems to regard humanity from the POV of the plant kingdom — “meet you as a creature who is locked into a reason.”
Did your mind crawl out of the sand?
Did your ways make you wise?
Do your eyes see what I am not
To become another life?
Do your life go on, Layman?
DOAUY
Do you know what I am not?
DOAUY
Here I am now all in my body core
Here I am now all blowing away
We're heading all my way
I'll lead your soul
I know the way
Oh, no, no, no
Here I am now, ohh, you remember all
Here I am now, ohh, blowing away
Did your eyes go dark in the sand?
I can't tell if you're alive
I am sure there is more in the mud
To become another life
Do your еyes go on, Layman?
DOAUY